Friday, January 29, 2010

With little fanfare, state governments have been digitizing their historical archives and putting mountains of new information online.

A new website called, logically enough, Digital State Archives, is beginning to sort through this newly-available content, and highlight the crème de la crème. Happily, a good deal of state archive materials are valuable resources for genealogists.

Here are just a few examples to whet your family-history appetites:

Alabama's Archives include online records of Civil War and World War I soldiers, as well as an 1867 Voter Registration database including thousands of newly-registered ex-slaves.

Alaska's archive collections include probate records, an index to pioneers, and a large collection of obituaries from historical newspapers and magazines.

The good folks at the Minnesota Archives, bless their archival hearts, have consolidated many of their historical name lookups into a single Minnesota People Find search page.

New York has a wonderful collection of the Harlem Hellfighters WWI Muster Rolls, and a huge Civil War database, while their archiving neighbors in Pennsylvania have their own collection of military records dating back to the Revolutionary War.

These links just skim the surface, of course. So much online material is available, and so much is continually being added, that state archives should be a regular internet stopping point for anyone serious about family history research.

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Monday, January 25, 2010

One branch of my family harks back to the Sarotchkin clan. Or maybe it was the Sarochkin's. Or Sorotchkin. Sarotzkin? Who knows?

Localized spelling of family names, non-Latin alphabets like Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic or Greek, and the whimsical nature of official papers like passenger manifests and immigration forms all contrive to make family history research even more complex than it otherwise is.

Which is why I'm writing today to suggest a visit to the slightly oddly-named Genealogy Indexer. This site (currently in beta) does two very interesting and very useful things.

One, it compiles some primary European resources that you don't see all the time, like historical directories, military records, and Yizkor books (memorials to the Jewish dead). The focus is primarily Eastern Europe, though there are resources here from France and the UK, among other countries.

Secondly, it incorporates three search functions:

exact search on a name or keyword (as spelled)

a Soundex search, which returns a wide variety of phonetic spelling variations

an OCR-adjusted search. This last also returns word variations, though I'm not very clear on what its underlying logic might be.

Try all three search types to compare results. And if the Soundex results are a bit overwhelming, you can use the Advanced Search features to narrow things down a bit.

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots..

Thursday, January 21, 2010

There are a few free newspaper archives available online that focus on the African American community, or on anti-slavery, or both. These are valuable resources for black history in general, and for black family history in particular. I hope to one day see more materials like this available online (Google News Archives, are you listening?).

But for now, the key materials are:

Freedom's Journal (1827-1829), a weekly publication from New York City, and widely regarded as the first major African-American newspaper in the country.

Google News Archives includes several black newspapers, including the Washington Afro-American, and similar publications from Baltimore and Richmond. To search include source:afro along with your search terms.

Two other archives of note are subscription services, but have rich collections just the same:

NewspaperArchive.com, is the world's largest online newspaper archive. They haven't yet made clear which of their publications are African American, but with billions of articles to search, they are certainly worth a visit for any serious genealogy researcher.

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Thanks to everyone who responded to the FGT Challenge of a few days ago. There are some terrific (frustrating, I know...but terrific just the same) family history roadblocks presented there. Feel free to continue adding comments there. I hope to be able to get to a few more of the challenges myself, but even if I don't, the commenters themselves have been offering some valuable insights and leads to help others out.

The proverbial brick wall!

One challenging situation provided in a comment from GenealSue Renzo was:

Joseph Henery Hyland was born in Nov 1863 somewhere in Ireland. According to the 1900 census he emigrated to Manhattan NY in 1885. Also according to this census he married Anna Keegan in 1892. He and Anna had four children, one daughter (my grandmother) and three sons. He appears again on the 1910 Manhattan census, but that's it. By 1920 his wife had re-married. I cannot locate bmd records,other family, immigration records or naturalization records.

Here's what I came up with from some of my favorite FGT resources:

CastleGarden.org shows a Joseph Hyland, age 21, arriving in NYC on December 16, 1885 on the ship, Lake Superior, from Liverpool. He is listed as a 'Laborer', but his nationality is not clearly stated.

Ancestry.com has a passenger list with a Hyland arriving in NY on May 16, 1885 from Queenstown, Ireland and Liverpool, England. First name is not totally clear, but seems to be an abbreviation: Jno, who is a 21 year old male from Ireland (ie, born 1863-64). He arrived on the ship, City of Richmond.

The NYC Death Index includes dozens of Joseph Hyland's. There doesn't seem to be quite the right combination of death year and age, except for one entry, where the date of death is February 19, 1919, and the age is unknown (actually, it's shown as 999 years!).

There are also NYC birth records online, with numerous Hyland births in the right date range. However, the online records provide the child's -- but not the parents' -- names, so it can't be pinned down with any certainty. Still...you might want to have a look:

FYI, you can request a search of NYC vital records (births, deaths, marriages) from the NYC Municipal Archives for a very reasonable fee:

That's it for now, but stay tuned for more FGT Challenge results

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots..

Monday, January 11, 2010

Today we're offering a free tool for you family history buffs that's a bit different from the usual name look-ups, databases, archives and such...the 2010 FGT Challenge:

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Post a personal genealogy challenge in the Comments here. I'll pick one for some in depth research, to see what FGT can find.

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So...tell us about your great grandfather, who seems to have disappeared without a trace, or your ancestors who immigrated to America, even though you can't find any record of their journey.

Who knows what mysteries will be revealed?

Don't be afraid to go way back, to your beknighted relatives in medieval England, perhaps.

Toss down the genealogical gauntlet...we'll see what we can find. So Comment away. Remember, though, this is a public webpage, so all material will be visible to my millions, erthousandsumm scores of FGT readers.

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

I can say with considerable confidence that I've come across a sizable collection of online, free books on ancestry and genealogy that no one's ever seen before.

How can I possibly know this? 'Cause I created the collection myself. And I'm happy to now be able to share it with you.

World War I Honor Roll,

from the U Michigan Library via Hathi Trust

I posted a few weeks ago about the Hathi Trust digital books collection. This is a pretty new and quite substantial resource, comprised of millions of digitized books housed at university libraries and other distinguished collections.

A nice feature of Hathi is that they give users the opportunity to create their own collection-within-a-collection. Hathi users have created personal collections of books on topics as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Dime Novels, and Historic Bicycling.

There's even a collection on How to Be a Domestic Goddess (with 123 books, no less!).

There's well over 2,000 books in the collection. Many of them are family genealogies, with titles like:

An historical and genealogical account of Andrew Robeson, of Scotland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and of his descendants from 1653 to 1916

An account of Azariah Orton, of Farmington, Illinois, and his descendants (1900)

The Robinsons and their kin folk (1902)

There are some geographic titles:

1800 census of Kent County, Delaware

Parochial and family history of the parishes of Tintagel and Trevalga, in the country of Cornwall (1877)

some deep-sounding reference works:

Passenger lists of ships coming to North America, 1607-1825; a bibliography (1937)

The abridged compendium of American genealogy; first families of America; a genealogical encyclopedia of the United States (1925)

and a fair number of mystery items:

Danmark-Norges len og lensmaend 1596-1660 (1885)

By the way, creating smallish collections at Hathi Trust is easy, but a large collection like this one, with thousands of documents, took some behind the scenes assistance. My sincerest thanks to Jeremy and Chris for their fast and effective help.

FGT-AGC@HT is fully searchable and access is, of course, entirely free. I'd love to hear your Commentsas to whether it's a useful collection, and how you used it for your family history research. Thanks.

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Perhaps one of your ancestors was a student class president. Scored the winning touchdown in the championship football game. Member of the debate team. Voted most likely to succeed...or go to jail! Whatever academic superlatives and shennanigans lie in their past, there are some very useful tools for unearthing some of their high school, college and university history.

First and foremost, are scattered but often fairly deep collections of college newspapers. If you're lucky, and grandpa's alma mater has its newspaper archives online, then you've struck gold. Granddad may well have been written up in the student paper, but even if he wasn't, you can still come away with a good overview of what campus life was like back in the day.

These can be a lot of fun to browse, but you need to do some scouting around to find them. A good trick is to search one of the commercial yearbooks sites like e-yearbook or even ebay to see what exists in digitized form. If you find one, then search the web more generally to see if it's posted for free. If it's not, then you can purchase the yearbooks from the sites where you found them, if you're so inclined.

Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Monday, January 4, 2010

There are a number of make-your-own-family-tree sites floating around. I happen to like TribalPages myself.

First off, it's a large search site, with a database of either 50 million or 25 million names (the site gives different numbers on different pages). Whatever the right number, though, it's a biggie.

The Queen's family tree is a large one.

Find your tribe as well.

Be sure to use the TribalPages search tool and search on your family name, to see what turns up. With luck, you may not only uncover some family history, but you may unearth an old portrait or two out of the more than 1.5 million photos at the site.

There's more here than just name searching, including the opportunity to build your own family tree website, free of charge. These are nicely done, interactive pages. Their sample page on the British Royal Family Tree gives you a good idea of the features available.

This is a site worth exploring.

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Don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Welcome to Free Genealogy Tools

While searching for your family history, you've no doubt already hit the main sites and services online. But there are a ton of free resources that are incredibly valuable and not very well-known. That's what Free Genealogy Tools is all about. Each new post will explore a new site you can use to research your family's origins in great depth.

But first, I have to mention two subscription services that are well worth the cost, and that also offer some useful freebies. Ancestry.comThis is the richest, quickest source of family history info on the web. You can search the site for free, though, to see what sort of info is available.

NewspaperArchive.comA fantastic resource... I've been a subscriber for years. Just about everyone's family gets into the newspapers at one time or another, with events large or small. This is the place to dig it all up.